More often than not, he said, he diligently abided every condition of his incarceration. And sometimes, he believes, a judge with no more cause than having a bad day would find something wrong — a lack of reporting in or denying a report of a "dirty" urinalysis test — that would tack on another three or nine months.

"I'm not looking to make excuses, but I've been through it so I know. The system may get people off the streets, but it also turns a lot of people against the world for some pretty minor stuff. Or worse, they turn on themselves. Like the song says, 'I am what you say I am.' They believe you're this bad guy, so you say to yourself, 'Well, that's what I'll become."'

Worse than you think

The next evening and some 60 miles to the south, panels of experts and a group of learned and dour listeners, gathered for a conference at the University of Utah law school, are coming to a similar conclusion, describing the current drug policy in academic terms: "incoherent, unjust, gone awry, run amok."

At the conference, Joseph Califano, a former domestic adviser to two U.S. presidents, is getting in the last word and coming very close to flying off the handle:

"There is complicity to this scourge at every level in our society," said Califano, the former four-pack-a-day smoker who believes Americans aren't necessarily crazy about drugs. "They're just high."

Not from ingesting alcohol, prescription and illegal drugs at 10 to 20 times the rate of any other developed country, "but from being addicted to denying this enemy within — the number one killer and crippler that will destroy us if we don't sober up."

"Whatever," said Alissa Stookey, a former heroin and meth addict. "It's the same tired old scare tactics: Get people in an agitated, highly suggestible state of mind, target 'the problem' out there, guilt people for not seeing it or doing enough to stop it, then sell them on an idea or product that ultimately provides a sense of security. Thing is, it's all just phantom comfort."

In the process, she and other users told the newspaper, drugs become an enemy so powerful that everything starts to feed off it: Getting high becomes an ever more serious crime, law enforcement gets bigger budgets, more people get busted, more of them go to jail, more jails get built, and next thing you know, drugs are the leading cause of nearly every societal ill.

"Nothing changes, except that people cower and frown and tell each other, 'Oh, it's just so terrible that so-and-so's son overdosed or so-and-so's daughter is in jail. Drugs, oh they're just so awful.' And that's as far as the discussion goes," Stookey said.